Hey everyone, as my username may suggest - my name is Ben Thames. I'm 21 years old, from Northwest Florida, & I've been playing music for about 5 years.
I introduced myself a little in another thread, but figured I'd also do it in the proper thread.
I've always loved music, but never really had any desire to play it until after a real nasty concussion took me out of high school sports completely. All my friends were musicians, so I figured I'd pick up bass. I started learning on a Monday, & that Wednesday I was sort of thrown into the deep end in my church's youth band. (I actually had to have one of my friends tab out where the notes were for all the songs - couldn't even follow a chord chart, lol).
About 6 months go by - I've learned the bass neck really well, learned some cool bass parts - everything was good, but I really wanted to play an instrument that could stand on its own as well. Due to becoming a musician, I start to listen to music differently. I no longer heard it as one overall sound, but a bunch of individual instrument parts coming together. Because of this, I started listening to songs I'd been hearing for years completely differently.
So, I'm listening to Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Pronounced" album one day, & hear Billy Powell's piano break on the song "Things Goin' On". Instantly, I thought, "that's what I want to do" & I've been playing piano ever since.
I started off learning everything from YouTube videos, just watching people play the parts I wanted to play & not really knowing how the parts were developed. Eventually, I got tired of doing it that way, & started learning some theory. Unlike a lot of folks I've met, I greatly enjoy theory & find it quite fascinating, so pretty quickly I began to really understand what was happening in the parts I was learning. Instead of seeing a run as a bunch of individual notes, I could recognize that "oh, he's just going down a couple octaves of the pentatonic blues scale there", for example.
After I finish college, I plan to move to Nashville & try my hand at getting some session work or some audio jobs. If I find myself not getting enough work, I'll have that business degree to fall back on.
I write a lot of music, & have some of my piano compositions on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. If you just look up my name, I'm the one with 5 instrumental tracks out.
Anyways, all of that to say - hello!